“If we want to continue to have food, and we want to continue to have a world with a climate that is inhabitable, then we need to think about the food we’re eating. We can’t just go on eating more and more meat and animal products because this is simply not sustainable. It uses up too much of the world’s resources and it’s responsible for putting out too much of the world’s greenhouse gases. If we want to have a long-term sustainable future, we can’t keep growing that. We have to bring that to a stable and eventually, a reducing component of animal products, because it’s the plant-based foods that provide more of what we need for fewer greenhouse gas emissions.”
— with thanks to Smitha Haneef of Campus Dining

Planning for our fifth annual Princeton Studies Food conference — this one in celebration of Princeton Environmental Institute’s new Food+Environment program of study — is under way. Please do mark your calendars and plan to devote most of Friday, Feb. 22 to solutions-oriented discussions and Q&A on water as prerequisite to the food chain. We also are planning additional events: a screening, in partnership with the Garden Theatre, of Leviathan, a documentary shot in the North Atlantic and focusing on the commercial fishing industry, with Professor D. Graham Burnett, author of Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature, offering introduction and discussion afterward; and a campus visit of James C. Scott, professor of political science and founding director of the Agrarian Studies program at Yale.

More to come as it develops.

Please celebrate our fourth anniversary at our one-hour panel and Q&A that looks at food systems study and projects under way and planned. As always, thanks to Gordon Douglas MD ’55 and Sheila Mahoney S’55, funders. Our panel is 11 a.m., Friday, June 1, McCosh 46, and is open to the public. (this post updated to reflect new panelist Christine Du Bois to replace Serena Stein, who leaves to continue research in Mozambique a few days before our panel).

PANELISTS:

Christine M. Du Bois ’84, is an anthropologist and a former research director, with the late Sidney Mintz, of the Johns Hopkins Project on Soybeans. She is a co-author and editor of The World of Soy (2008), a multidisciplinary exploration of soy as food across continents and centuries. Her just-released The Story of Soy follows the soybean from its ancient domestication all the way to its genetic modification in the present, including its uses as food, animal feed and biodiesel.

Tim Treuer, EEB grad student, who is following up on an almost-forgotten experiment of Daniel Janzen ’76 and Winnie Hallwachs ’76 that now showcases the power of discarded orange peels to regenerate a forest and to sequester carbon.

Rozalie Czesana ’18, our first graduate and first student member of Princeton Studies Food, who, in addition to work on wasted food and other Greening Dining projects, and directing students to best options for meals in dining halls, helped to create and shepherd the Science, Society & Dinner course with Karla Cook, co-founder of PSF, and Professor Kelly Caylor, now at UC-Santa Barbara.

INTRODUCTION: Gordon Douglas MD ’55, Princeton Studies Food co-founder, is Professor Emeritus of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and is director of three biotech companies: Vical, Inc. Novadigm, and Protein Sciences. He was president of the Merck Vaccine Division from 1989 until 1999. Previously, he was an infectious disease specialist with research interests in respiratory viral infections, vaccines, and antivirals at Weill Cornell Medical College and the University of Rochester School of Medicine.

MODERATOR: Professor Dan Rubenstein, who studies mutualism and whose new course, Agriculture, Human Diets and the Environment, includes the life cycle analysis of a 2050 menu and is partnering with Campus Dining Services to serve samples of relevant dishes to registered students.